1st-quarter numbers

a href=”http://www.successfulexpediters.com/madsen/madsen_home_page.htm”img id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324918193966143394″ style=”FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 245px” alt=”” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ez6JTnOl_tQ/SeXo4oFd16I/AAAAAAAAAQs/CCtDY2k15ew/s320/madsens_with_truck.jpg” border=”0″ //aA down-and-dirty perspective on the freight slowdown a href=”http://www.successfulexpediters.com/madsen/madsen_blog.htm#first_q_numbers”here/a from blogger and expedited (Fed-Ex White Glove Services) owner-operator Phil Madsen, part of a team with his wife, Diane (both pictured, with their truck). They hauled 25 percent fewer loads for a gross revenue down 25 percent in the first quarter of this year, Madsen writes. “In other words, the freight slowdown is not only continuing, but the decline is accelerating. Last year’s 20 percent decline has given way to this quarter’s 25 percent decline.” Madsen continues:br /divbr /emLooking around to see what else is going on, the news is not encouraging. Container ships are stacking up on ports around the world because there is not enough freight for many of them to haul. Airlines are mothballing planes in record numbers. North American rail freight is down 16.6 percent in the first three months of this year. Unemployment remains high, etc., etc., etc./em/divbr /divem/em/divdivMadsen continues on a more hopeful note, though, with an admission that, more than anything, he and his wife are “grateful as ever to be healthy and happy on the road. While we would of course prefer to be making more money, we continue to believe this is the best job we have ever had. If we were back in our old white-collar carrers, we might not have jobs at all.”/divbr /div/divdivPhil and Diane transitioned to trucking from previous work in the legal (Diane) and financial consulting (Phil) fields before venturing out on a “property-free” existence at home on the road — a story that was chronicled in emOverdrive /emsister magazine a href=”http://www.etrucker.com/apps/news/article.asp?id=67184″emTruckers News /emlast year/a. Phil’s blog is a great mix, as evidenced above, of hard business information and analysis and more personal stuff — keep an eye on it from time to time a href=”http://www.successfulexpediters.com/madsen/madsen_blog.htm”here./a/divdiv/divbr /diva onclick=”window.open(‘http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘digg’); return false;” href=”http://digg.com/submit”Digg/a/divdiva onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title),’facebook’); return false;” href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php”facebook/a /divdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills (tdills@rrpub.com) is its author./div